French Pamphlets at the Newberry

Posted on December 4, 2013 by briansandberg

Research Methods Workshop for Early Career Graduate Students
French Pamphlets at the Newberry: The Formation of the Concept of “Revolution” and Revolutionary Ideology
Directed by Dale Van Kley, Ohio State University
Meets 9:00 am to 4:45 pm Friday, January 31, and 10:00 am to 12:00 noon on Saturday, February 1.

http://www.newberry.org/01312014-january-2014-research-methods-workshop-early-career-graduate-students

Prerequisite: Basic reading knowledge of French. The language of instruction will be English.

See the link above for eligibility, prerequisites, and application information. Please forward this message to others who may be interested.

Graduate students at member institutions of the Center for Renaissance Studies consortium may be eligible to apply for travel funding to attend this program: http://www.newberry.org/newberry-renaissance-consortium-grants.

Posted in Archival Research, Comparative Revolutions, Early Modern Europe, Early Modern World, French Revolution and Napoleon, Graduate Work in History, Information Management, Lectures and Seminars, Political Culture, Revolts and Revolutions | Leave a comment

WSFH Call for Papers

Posted on December 2, 2013 by briansandberg

eiffeltower

This is a call for submissions for the Western Society for French History’s annual paper prizes.  All papers given at the 2013 meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, are eligible.  To be considered for any of these prizes, please send your paper in electronic format (as an email attachment in Microsoft Word) by Friday, 31 January 2013, specifying the award(s) for which you would like to be considered.  Submissions should be no longer than 14 double spaced pages including all appropriate citations and bibliographical information.  The winners will be announced at the business meeting at the WSFH conference in San Antonio in October 2014.

Please send all submissions and direct all queries to Carolyn Eichner at eichner@uwm.edu.

For more information on these awards and the WSFH supporters for whom they are named, see wsfh.org/prizes-and-grants/htm

The Prizes:

The Ronald S. Love Prize is awarded to the best graduate student paper on the history of France before 1800, or any period of history concerning French colonies or the Francophone world.

The Edward T. Gargan Prize is awarded to the best graduate student paper on post-1800 history.

The Millstone Prize is awarded to the best interdisciplinary paper.

The 2013-14 Prize Committee is composed of Kate Hamerton, Joelle Rollo-Koster, Matthew Gerber, Cheryl Koos, and Carolyn Eichner (chair).

 

Posted in Conferences, Early Modern Europe, European History, French History, Graduate Work in History | Leave a comment

French Paleography Workshop

Posted on December 2, 2013 by briansandberg

MeeterCenter

The 2014 French Paleography workshop will take place at the Meeter Center for Calvin Studies in Grand Rapids, Michigan, from June 16 through June 27, 2014. The workshop is co-sponsored by the Meeter Center and the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, and will be taught by Dr. Thomas Lambert, who is a highly-experienced paleographer and researcher, who has worked for many years on transcribing, editing, and publishing the minutes of the Genevan Consistory.

Selected participants will receive a $500 bursary to help defray travel and accommodation expenses. This workshop is directed primarily at graduate students and faculty. The chief pre-requisite is an ability to read modern French fluently. Please see the attached file for more information on the workshop and an application form. Feel free to copy and distribute the materials. Prospective applicants may also go to the website to access the information and the form: www.calvin.edu/meeter/paleography.

Please do not hesitate to contact Karin Maag, Director of the Meeter Center (1-616-526-6089 or kmaag@calvin.edu), with any questions you may have.

Posted in Archival Research, French History, Graduate Work in History, Grants and Fellowships, Lectures and Seminars | 1 Comment

New Research on the Mediterranean Diet

Posted on November 23, 2013 by briansandberg

The Mediterranean Diet is often touted as one of the world’s healthiest and most nutritious diets. Researchers recently released the results from a new study of the Mediterranean Diet.

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“A new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine finds that women who followed this pattern of eating in their 50s were about 40 percent more likely to reach the later decades without developing chronic diseases and memory or physical problems, compared to women who didn’t eat as well.”

The study’s methodology involved tracking more than 10,000 women’s diets over 15 years, using surveys to gather data.

Definitions of a “Mediterranean Diet” have been contested, however.

NPR reports on the new research on the Mediterranean Diet.

Posted in European History, Food and Cuisine History, History of Medicine, Languedoc and Southern France, Mediterranean World | 1 Comment

Commemorating JFK’s Assassination

Posted on November 22, 2013 by briansandberg

Historians have been absorbed with questions of historical memory and commemoration over the past two decades. Historian Pierre Nora’s influential analysis of history and memory has spawned an entire subfield of historical studies of commemoration.

Commemorating historical episodes of violence such as the Holocaust and the dropping of the atomic bombs have been especially controversial.

JFKassassination

Today, on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, historians and journalists are grappling with the difficulties of commemorating an act of political violence.

TexasSchoolBookDepository

The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, offers a permanent collection and temporary exhibits on President Kennedy and the assassination at the site Lee Harvey Oswald used as his firing platform.

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The BBC provides an essay on the museum and current attempts to commemorate the 1963 assassination. The Washington Post has published a series of commemorative stories, videos, and photo galleries.

Posted in Historical Film, History in the Media, History of Violence, Museums and Historical Memory, Political Culture | Leave a comment

Conference on René Allio and Historical Film

Posted on November 19, 2013 by briansandberg

René Allio was one of the most important French directors of historical film in the 1960s and 1970s. Most of Allio’s films focused on historical subjects by depicting historical events, people, or sites. The director is most remembered for his films Les Camisards and Moi, Pierre Rivière. Today, Allio is relatively unappreciated by film historians and fans, largely because of the unavailability or poor condition of copies of his films.

ReneAllio

I participated in a conference on Les Histoires de René Allio in Paris last week (14-16 November 2013). The conference was organized by the Université de Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne) and held at the Institut Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Art (INHA). The conference and a linked exhibition at the Muséum Nationale de l’Histoire Naturelle aim to renew interest in the figure of René Allio through interdisciplinary study of his cinematic and artistic work.

The conference included presentations by historians, film historians, art historians, legal historians, literary scholars, actors, and filmmakers focusing on various aspects of Allio’s historical films and artistic work.

I presented a paper on ” Les sources iconographiques dans Les Camisards de René Allio : religion et résistance en Languedoc.”

LesCamisards-battle

The press release for the conference is available online.

Posted in Conferences, Early Modern Europe, Early Modern World, European History, French History, Historical Film, History in the Media, Revolts and Revolutions, War in Film | Leave a comment

Nelson, Navy, Nation

Posted on October 30, 2013 by briansandberg

Britain’s National Maritime Museum recently opened a new permanent gallery on “Nelson, Navy, Nation: The Story of the Royal Navy and the British People, 1688-1815.”

Abbott-Nelson

The National Maritime Museum explains: “From bustling dockyards to ferocious sea battles, the gallery brings to life the tumultuous 18th century, exploring how the Royal Navy shaped everyday lives as it became a central part of society and turned sea-faring heroes into national celebrities.”

“Journeying from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, Nelson, Navy, Nation brings together over 250 star objects from the Museum’s collections, from the sailor’s shoes worn to impress on shore leave and love tokens sent to sweethearts, to a fiendish seven-barrelled volley gun and an amputation knife and bullet forceps. Discover what made men join up, how they lived and what kept them in line; and how the Navy loomed large in all areas of the popular imagination, from caricatures to keepsakes and collectables.”

Dighton-FallofNelson

“Showcasing Admiral Lord Nelson’s iconic uniform and personal items as well as weird and wonderful Nelson memorabilia, the gallery considers the legendary national hero within the context of his day, making sense of his achievements and dazzling celebrity while telling a wider story about British society.”

“Taking in sailors as well as Admirals, landlubbers as well as seadogs, women as well as men and ordinary life as well as the heat of battle, follow the story of the early days of a national institution which in turn shaped the story of how British people saw themselves, and their place in the world.”

The National Maritime Museum website provides information on the new gallery.

Posted in Early Modern Europe, Early Modern World, Empires and Imperialism, French History, French Revolution and Napoleon, Maritime History, Museums and Historical Memory, War, Culture, and Society, Warfare in the Early Modern World | Leave a comment

Sixteenth Century Studies Conference

Posted on October 30, 2013 by briansandberg

I participated in the 2013 Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (SCSC) in San Juan, Puerto Rico, last weekend. The stunning bastioned fortifications of San Juan provided a fantastic setting for a conference on early modern history.

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I presented a paper on the “Massacre of the Innocents: Gender and Martyrdom in the French Wars of Religion,” in panel 20 on Gender and the Wars of Religion in France, along with Amanda Eurich, who organized the session and gave a paper on “The Woman behind Jean de Coras: Jacquette de Bussy and the Role of Women in the French Wars of Religion.”

I also chaired panel 153 on Early Modern Political Gestures and commented on the papers by Cassandra Auble, Jonathan Vallerius, and Matthew Vester.

I also attended sessions 23, 104, 127, and 230, as well as panel-hopping between sessions 250 and 252.

The conference was fabulous, with numerous sessions on early modern French, Italian, and Mediterranean history. I absorbed the latest research on women in the French Wars of Religion, perceptions of natural disasters, understandings of blushing, commemorations of the English Civil Wars, French siege narratives, Huguenot identities, confessional boundaries, political gestures, Italian religious heterodoxy, and early football (soccer) in Florence.

The sessions were generally well attended, despite the temptations of Puerto Rico, in part because the coastal location allowed for spending ample time at the beach in the early mornings and late afternoons, before and after the conference sessions.

I was able to visit Viejo San Juan (Old San Juan), the bastioned fortifications, the art museums, and the Condado and Santurce neighborhoods.

The 2013 SCSC conference program is available online. The SCSC website provides additional information on early modern historical research and resources.

Posted in Conferences, Early Modern Europe, Early Modern World, European History, European Wars of Religion, French Wars of Religion, Gender and Warfare, History of Violence, Reformation History, Renaissance Art and History, War, Culture, and Society, Warfare in the Early Modern World, Women and Gender History | Leave a comment

Black Flag: Pirate History and Video Gaming

Posted on October 30, 2013 by briansandberg

Pirate mania continues.  Following the creation of Talk Like a Pirate Day and the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, the Assassin’s Creed video games franchise has now shifted into the piracy business.

AC4-pirates

Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag is the latest installment of this popular video game series. Set around in the early modern Caribbean in 1715, the video game focuses on

According to the review in the New York Times, “The pirate adventure Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is nearly as long and almost as beautiful as an actual vacation to the tropics.”

The review explains that “virtual travelers may explore a period-precise Havana and Kingston, Jamaica; visit Nassau, the Bahamas, and Tulum, Mexico; and sail to dozens of islands. They may see churches, slip through plantations, kill British and Spanish authorities (to a pirate, they’re all bad) and take to the high seas to plunder a galleon, harpoon a whale or follow a treasure map to a buried chest.”

The reviewer raves that: “No moment in this huge game is more satisfying than the successful sinking, on a stormy sea, of a convoy led by a massive British man-of-war. It’s fun to be a pirate.”

AC4-ships

The game apparently offers a stunning visual setting that effectively reconstructs the look of the early eighteenth-century Caribbean.  But, the reviewer points out, “Assassin’s Creed games have long mixed their historical fiction with some Dan Brown-style “Da Vinci Code” paranoia.”

AC4-island

Northern Illinois University students in HIST 111 Western Civilization, 1500-1815 will be interested in this story, since we are discussing the slave trade and piracy in the early modern Atlantic world.

The New York Times reviews Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, which has just been released.

Posted in Atlantic World, Digital Humanities, Early Modern Europe, Early Modern World, Empires and Imperialism, European History, History in the Media, History of Violence, Information Management, Piracy, War, Culture, and Society, Warfare in the Early Modern World | Leave a comment

Big Data is Bullshit

Posted on October 30, 2013 by briansandberg

Harper Reed, who was Chief Technology Officer for the 2012 Obama re-election campaign, participated in a conference on Building a Smarter University: Big Data, Innovation, and Ingenuity at the State University of New York (SUNY) this week, giving a keynote address.

“Big Data is bullshit,” Reed exclaimed.

HarperReed

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that: “Mr. Reed is generally bullish on the power of data. He took the audience through a litany of ways in which President Obama used data to win re-election, such as scraping supporters’ Facebook information to blast out personalized email messages.”

“But, with apologies to the technology companies sponsoring the SUNY event, Mr. Reed skewered their industry’s promotion of the buzzwords ‘Big Data,'” according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“The ‘big’ there is purely marketing,” Mr. Reed reportedly said. “This is all fear … This is about you buying big expensive servers and whatnot.”

Reed’s criticism exposes the big money interests promoting the SUNY conference and other higher education “reform” initiatives across the nation. The SUNY conference website announces that its sponsors include Xerox, EMC2, McGraw Hill Education, TIAA CREF, CISCO, ING, and IBM.

Those of us working in the digital humanities need to consider carefully what approaches to database construction, data mining, and data usage fit with the principles and standards of academic research. Otherwise, we risk allowing big education and technology corporations to drive the agenda of digital humanities, technology-assisted learning, and higher education in general.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on Harper Reed’s keynote address. Mother Jones reports on Reed’s use of data mining in the Obama campaign.

Note: I was unable to attend the SUNY conference, but I hope to find out more about the presentations as they get posted on the conference website.

Posted in Digital Humanities, History in the Media, Humanities Education, Information Management | 2 Comments